21 Healthcare Marketing Strategies To Attract More High Value Patients

*Originally published March 12, 2015. Extensively updated with new content on February 20, 2017.

Let's face it, as busy medical professionals, you often find yourself too strapped for time to work out all the details of a successful medical marketing strategy. Or, you might read about marketing strategies for healthcare such as SEO or social media, but you aren't sure of the best way to get started.

When it comes to health-related queries, the initial interaction is usually a Google search. Along with search results, Google may also display in-depth information on illnesses with symptoms, treatment options, graphs, and related links to medical websites.

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This will essentially make it easier for individuals to self-diagnose with a chance of increased accuracy, as the information will be derived from licensed medical providers (like you).

Google takes the work out of scouring the web to find good answers from reliable sources. Google's knowledge base, known as Knowledge Graph, was built to be smarter than your average search results because it connects the query with real-world elements.

Although Google is not a replacement for a doctor, it is an ideal place to start when it comes to collecting useful information related to a health condition. Doctors need to remember that it’s not meant to be perceived as Dr. Google, it’s just a platform to help make decisions related to personal healthcare.

From a patient’s perspective, it is important to note that any slight variance in wording or even simple typing errors can give you completely different results.

Bottom line? Google results are not intended to replace physicians.

Search results are just a platform to gather basic information before a patient sets an appointment with a doctor.

Google says they have always focused on providing the best answers to user queries. Over the last couple of years, search results have significantly improved after Google started providing answers in answer boxes and local search results.

From a user's perspective, this has made it easier to get very specific answers with just one search. When you search for a medical condition on this search engine, you will find the following in the results:

General description (of the medical condition)

Symptoms

Causes

Tests

Treatments

Prognosis

Prevention

Links to National Library of Medicine

At this point, you might be wondering how digital marketing can benefit you, right?

How Digital Marketing Works in Healthcare

The Af﻿﻿fordable Health Care Act has significantly increased demand for healthcare professionals. As healthcare has become available to more of the general population, those who never considered a doctor's consultation are now able to do so.

As a result, the marketplace has progressively become more competitive, and this makes it very important for medical professionals to stand out and a﻿﻿ccura﻿﻿tely market their services.

To do this, you'll want to make extensive use of your website, social media, and ​be sure your healthcare marketing strategies that you implement are designed to connect you with potential patients.

By engaging with your target audience/persona, you'll be able to communicate exactly what you offer, along with the benefits of accepting that offer. Sharing accolades, highlighting staff members, and engaging in online advertising campaigns can essentially help to close the deal with an initial consultation.

In this post, I cut to the chase, delivering you 21 essential medical marketing tips you can start using TODAY. So, without further ado, let’s get started!

Why These 21 Healthcare Marketing Techniques?

It's simple.

We want you to have the most effective methods of marketing your practice that will bring you the most bang for your buck.

Some of these marketing strategies in healthcare are more in-depth than others, and take a bit more to get going.

That said, these are the most effective marketing strategies for doctors and other medical professionals that you'll come across.

1. Use some lead-generating SEO strategies as part of your medical marketing plan

SEO is one of the most important aspects of online marketing for healthcare professionals such as doctors and dentists. Simply put, it allows people online to find you — instead of your competitors. But just because more people visit your site doesn’t mean they’ll turn into viable leads - unless you use targeted landing pages.

Instapage mentioned that over 1,000 landing pages are designed with their software every day which goes to show that marketers are embracing landing pages.

​Host live online events

​Hosting online events is an excellent way to establish credibility in your industry and expand your network.

Use the right keywords

Spend some time researching relevant keywords related to your audience’s search intent, and have your writer follow SEO best practices to incorporate them into the content for your medical marketing strategy.

Also, look out for ultra-relevant long-tail keywords to incorporate into your content creation. These will be easier to rank than the really competitive terms.

Of course #2! They are already sold on sleep dentistry, and they are specifically looking for somebody in Henderson that provides this service, so if you can show up for that particular term, then the chances of closing that website visitor are much higher than closing the visitor simply searching for a dentist.

So, what's the quick win you can take from this?

Spend a couple of minutes each day for the next week and come up with some longer phrases that your ideal patients may use, and then have content written for those pages.

By doing this one time now, you'll be able to likely generate fairly quick rankings in the search results, and assuming you are practicing good SEO, then these rankings should stay unless there's a major change with competition in your local market.

Use lead magnets

Back in the day, it was easy for website visitors to give out their details just like that. They liked the idea of receiving information right in their inbox for free.

But these days, information is virtually everywhere and you would need to entice visitors ethically before they share their details with you.

A lead magnet is that ethical bribe, a free offer that you put up on your lead generation page in order to incentivize prospective patients to give you their email, name, phone number or whatever detail you ask for.

Develop a clear call to action to use for your web content

Yes, you may already know that calls-to-action are an important conversion element, but if you want results, you have to go beyond just that 'outsider' knowledge to actually knowing how to kick ass with CTAs (calls to action).

According to SEO expert Mark Kabana, “Content should have a clear call-to-action and/or lead capture form.”

But adding just one CTA button to your homepage isn't enough.

You need to include CTAs on every page so that prospective patients can click on them irrespective of where they are on your website.

This doesn't mean you clutter up your website with big, flashy buttons everywhere.

Your CTA needs to be enticing and different from the usual "Sign up here" which has become less effective over the years.

Once you are experienced with CTA's and you feel comfortable with how they are performing, and how to change them, then consider testing them. You can create a new design, perhaps place it in a different spot, or change colors, and see what performs better.

Get on Google Adwords’ free Keyword Planner tool and start searching for long-tail keywords to target. Learn how to use Keyword Planner here.

2. Increase the Effectiveness of Your Medical Website

The main purpose of your website is what? To sit there and look pretty? Of course not — it’s to attract patients. But in order to make sure your site best serves this goal, you need to use strategies that convert your website visitors into patients.

Leads are likely to go away if they find that your website takes longer than expected to load.

So, if you're serious about generating leads and converting visitors into patients, you need to ensure you are paying attention to your website's load time, and that you aren't frustrating people because you have a slow website.

Your website is only as good as it is fresh — even if it was great when you put it together, the utility of your web content diminishes over time as it becomes dated. Here are the steps to update your website to improve its quality:

Update your current web content — This includes your website copy as well as “under the hood” elements like URLs and meta tags.

Edit for credibility — Edit your existing web copy for grammar and clarity, adding sources and statistics to increase its validity. The quality of your copy speaks to your credibility.

Strengthen your titles and meta-descriptions — Demonstrate the value of your content by highlighting key points and calls to action within the title and meta description.

Post authoritative, up-to-date news — Posting authoritative information on a regular basis is the best way to attract traffic to your site.

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Launch an FTP program to search your website’s directories. Make sure no old, unlinked web pages are still accessible online.

5. Build authority and improve SEO with your blog

In the 2014 HubSpot State of Inbound, it was noted that marketers who have prioritized blogging are 13x more likely to enjoy positive ROI.

As a doctor, you’re an expert in your field, and as such, you have valuable information to share with both existing and prospective patients.

Blogging healthcare marketing techniques allow you to do this.

It's a win-win: You add value to their lives through education; they understand better what you're doing and buy into it.

But that's not all that blogging does. It can also bring visitors to your website on a regular basis, even when they may not necessarily need medical help, making it one of the essentials of health care marketing.

That's more leads being nurtured and an optimized opportunity for conversion.

In addition to making your website more attractive to visitors, blogging also has the potential to make you more visible in search engines. This helps your website to rank naturally so that leads can find you.

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Sign up for Google Adwords and use their Keyword Planner tool to brainstorm keywords to optimize your blog posts. ​

6. Use effective messaging in your marketing copy

As a doctor, the words you use in your marketing copy are incredibly important. This applies to everything from your doctor﻿﻿ website to brochures and other printed communications, to your social media presence.

For example, as pointed out in this Physicians Practice article, using wording like “At our practice, we strive to…” will hurt you. Patients don’t want you to try; they want you to deliver.

​

Do you have a healthy digital marketing strategy (healthcare-specific)?

7. Utilize web analytics to monitor your visitor activity

Web analytics programs allow you to see the behavior of your website visitors, tracking the number of visitors to your site, the length of visits, how people find your site, and what pages they view on your site.

These metrics give you the information you need to test different pages and see what works and what doesn’t. Here are some things you can do with web analytics:

Get referral statistics to know where your traffic is coming from.

See what search words people are using to find you (organic traffic) so you can target these keywords with SEO.

See your bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors that leave your website soon after visiting a single page on your site.

8. Use on-page SEO to boost your website’s visibility

On-page SEO is one of the most overlooked aspects of building your online presence. However, it is a vital tactic to ramp up your site’s visibility so that it appears in search results.

According to a shopping and personal finance study carried out by Interconnected World in 2012, 44% of online shoppers begin by using a search engine. And health-related questions account for as much as 20% of all Google searches!

​In 2013, Chitika published a study which stated that the number one spot on Google organic search results gets about 32.5% of the traffic, the second spot gets 18%, and the traffic only degrades from there.

9. Keep up on technical SEO

Keywords and other on-page factors are only the first steps in search engine optimization.

You should also take a few minutes to make sure your website is search engine friendly by running your own site crawler, such as Screaming Frog.

​Programs such as Screaming Frog or Wild Shark will show you all your errors, redirects, and all other website components that you may need to fix in order to get the maximum amount of 'juice' or ranking ability out of your website.

​How is this helping you save time?

​What would you rather do:

Go through your website page by page and look at everything 'under the hood'?

Run a report and have it spit out the results in a few minutes?

Check out the awesome data I'm able to pull within seconds using Wild Shark. I get the URL, the title tag, if it is indexed or not, heading tags, etc.

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Make a commitment to checking your site’s crawlability whenever you make major changes. Run Screaming Frog or a similar tool monthly to keep up on technical SEO.

10. Bond with your target market

To create loyal patients, you need to do more than offer outstanding service. You also need to use service marketing strategies for health to connect with patients online. And one of the best places to do this is on your blog. The following blogging tips can help you bond with your target market:

Expound on the services you offer, putting a positive spin on these treatments.

11. Identify your unique selling proposition to compete in a crowded field

If you don’t have a USP or unique selling proposition for your healthcare practice, it’s high time you get one. Defining your USP will benefit you in important ways — it will make you more competitive in your field by helping you identify your target market and providing direction for your branding efforts.

Your USP is simply what differentiates your practice from other practices, or what makes your business special. You can also think of your USP as your healthcare niche.

It's quite simple: an effective medical marketing plan will place emphasis on what makes YOU unique and why people should choose you.

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Brainstorm for a few minutes on how you would define your niche. Then consolidate these ideas into one or two sentences.

12. Use local SEO tools to optimize your local presence

All healthcare practices need a strong local presence so that people searching for healthcare services in the specific area you serve will find your business online. For this reason, local SEO is more important than generalized SEO for the healthcare segment.

As a doctor, you also need to make sure that your physician marketing strategy includes a strong focus on your local business listings.

This is so important for doctors because you want to show up in the Google local results because that's where the vast majority of people searching will click when Google displays the search results.

Local SEO requires a strategic, holistic approach, with regular testing and tweaking as Google’s algorithms change. So, you’re not going to win at local SEO in a day. But there are some tools you can start using right away to get started with local SEO.

Geo-targeting is the practice of determining the location of a visitor and delivering relevant content to them based on their geographic criteria like country, region, state, city, zip code, IP address, etc.

Geo-targeting can be used to target local patients through paid ads and organic search.

You can use Google Trends to enhance your geo-targeting campaign.

Google Trends is a tool that shows how frequently a search term is entered on Google over a period of time and across different locations.

To learn more about these and many other local SEO tools, read 24 Awesome Local SEO Tools That Will Help You Boost Your Results.

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Schema is increasingly important in local SEO. Fill out the Schema ﻿﻿Generator﻿ form to generate the Schema markup for your website and apply the schema as appropriate.

These people are using social media to search for everything from what to eat for lunch to the best-paying jobs and a new dentist. And as a smart service professional, you have to take advantage of this. Fully.

Whether you’re a dentist, a chiropractor, or a surgeon, social media is a great way to connect with potential patients. Most healthcare professionals have 'a' social media presence, but few of them actually leverage this presence to maximize its potential for attracting new patients.

Here are just a few things you should be doing on social media on a regular basis:

Retweeting and favoriting things your followers post

Commenting on your followers’ posts

Responding to people’s tweets and posts to/about your business

Connecting with other professionals in your field or local area

Uploading shareable videos, photos, and content

Following/adding patients on social media

Social media management can be time-consuming, but it’s a lot easier if you use some helpful tools. H﻿﻿oo﻿﻿﻿﻿tsuite, Social Oomph, Buffer, and IFTTT are all examples of popular social media automation tools that can save you time.

Each tool has its own unique features, but nearly all of them can help simplify your social media marketing efforts by:

Helping you manage and post to multiple platforms

Scheduling tweets, posts, and messages

Tracking mentions of your medical practice

Offering social media traffic analysis tools

Here's a screenshot of Hootsuite in action. It may look a bit confusing, but it really is pretty straightforward.

It'll allow you to log into one dashboard to view all your social profiles and respond, interact, post, reply, follow, like, etc. It's a great timesaver for your marketing strategy for healthcare.

A major mistake that many marketers make is taking advantage of automation tools, setting up posts, and then walking away.

That said, you don’t need to spend hours a day on social media in order to be effective. By just logging on for 15 minutes per day, you can focus on posting relevant content (publishing it through your automation platform), responding to engagement you’ve received on your previous posts, and searching for new opportunities to connect with your audience.

While some doctors don’t do enough online marketing, others take it too far in the other direction, going crazy with pushy sales messages via email and social media. Granted, it can be difficult to determine “how much is enough” and when promoting becomes pushing.

In general, a rule of thumb to follow is that it’s good to post on Facebook about once a day. Twitter is a little different, as you can post more often without annoying people. Learn more about how doctors can time social media posts for maximum effectiveness.

14. Make a healthcare website your patients will love

Your website is your primary salesforce and face of your practice. Both existing patients and potential patients should get value out of your website. Your website needs certain elements in order to connect with people and thereby enhance your reputation and ultimately grow your practice.

Address Frictions

​Some prospects may have concerns, disagreements, or objections with your offering.

​These concerns, disagreements, and objections are called frictions. They delay prospects from taking actions.

​To get rid of this and turbocharge prospects to book an appointment, you would need to tackle those frictions.

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One way to do this (reduce friction) is to provide answers upfront to simple concerns like the direction to your clinic, your hours of operation, etc., and answers to patients' frequently asked questions.

I mean, it wouldn't make sense for a potential patient to come to your office just to ask what type of eye care services you offer, but a FAQ page on your site will give potential patients the needed information that can make them to book an appointment with you at the drop of a hat.

Include trust badges on your website (Member of the Chamber of Commerce, an accreditation, BBB membership, etc.)

Make it easy to contact you

To book an appointment with you, a prospective patient needs to contact you. The easiest way to make them not to contact you, actually, is to make it difficult for them to contact you.

Conversely, offering your potential patients different contact options can make all the difference.

While contact forms are great contact tools, most people hate CAPTCHA and wouldn't bother entering it. So if you use a captcha, make it an effective, yet easy one to use.

Also consider placing your email address above the fold and in a place that prospects can easily see them. Don't make them comb your site in search of it, otherwise, they'll simply go away unconverted.

Provide Appointment-booking Features for Patients

Does your website offer the ability to book an appointment online? I hope so, these days, you can potentially lose patients because they prefer to do business online as opposed to calling. It's an easy thing to add, in fact, your practice management software may even provide a small snippet of code that you can place on your site, which will add a cool little 'Book Appointment' button on your site.

The bio page for Dr. Eli Thornock of Sound Smiles Dental gives you a good feel for who Dr. Thornock is as a dentist and as a person.

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Get your staff together to brainstorm ideas for filming a quick, fun video that you can post on your site.

15. Put together a successful email marketing campaign

Healthcare professionals can greatly benefit by collecting and segmenting an email list of patients and potential patients. And then, to take it a step further, segmenting that list by the patients' interests. You can use your mailing list to send out regular newsletters and to update patients and leads on industry advances and happenings within your practice.

In order for your email marketing to be successful (i.e., provoke the response you want and not be viewed as “spam”), it needs to demonstrate value and get to the point quickly. Here are several things you can do to make your email marketing campaign work for you:

Email regularly but not too much

Create quality titles and content

Make calls to action clear and concise

Ask for input to encourage a two-way conversation

With ema﻿﻿il marketing for doctors, it’s ideal to reach out to patients about once a month. A weekly email will probably cause a lot of people to hit that “unsubscribe” button. Also, be careful with your subject line and content so that your emails don’t end up in people’s SPAM folders.

Pop-up forms (opt-in forms that pop up just when a visitor is about to leave your site) are great for capturing this sort of leads.

But remember to include privacy assurance in the forms. This reduces risk and shows prospects that you care about their privacy.

​If you have a WordPress website for your healthcare brand, check out this link for some good information about the best pop-up opt-in form plugins for WordPress (2017).

Email marketing is the most fundamental tactic businesses use to follow up with leads that have expressed interest in your company by signing up for a mailing list.

Luckily, there are a ton of great automation tools out there to save you time on this task, such as:

Choose the one that has the best pricing and features for you, and you'll find that you are saving time because of features such as triggered email and campaign analytics.

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If you haven’t already, get started with an email marketing service. Choose the one that offers a free trial and has the best pricing and features for you, and you'll find that you are saving time because of features such as triggered email and campaign analytics.

16. Create a sales funnel

It's not every visitor that lands on your website that will buy right away. Most of them may not immediately need medical attention, but that doesn't mean they won't need it in the future.

In fact, almost everyone would need to visit a doctor at some point in their life.

So, the smartest thing to do here is to collect their details as outlined above AND create a sales funnel through which you can nurture leads and drive them through the conversion process until they're ready to visit you.

Bonus tip: Browse a sample healthcare marketing plan or two. Browsing a healthcare marketing plan example will help you figure out how to execute your strategy.

This is where e﻿﻿m﻿﻿ail marketing will come in handy as part of your marketing plan. You don't need to send them daily or weekly emails necessarily. What is far more important is that you are emailing them information that pertains to them, and on a regular basis so that you stay top of mind for when they have a need for your services.

17. Create some great content to market your practice

There are already authoritative sources for health-related information like WebMD and Google’s Answer Boxes. As a result, be sure to make a significant effort to attract patients that are accessing this information. To be successful in this evolving marketplace, medical professionals need to post new and high-quality content that relates to their practice. This can be done via blogs, white paper, and posts on social media.

Think about this in terms of brand image and value. Regardless of whether you’re a dentist or surgeon, the rules are the same for every segment in the industry. If you actively maintain your web presence and Google ranking, it will help to drive traffic to your website and improve your chances of getting new patients. Further, staying current and visible online will also help you hold on to your current patients.

Content marketing is a key aspect of online marketing for healthcare professionals that works in tandem with other marketing techniques such as SEO and social media marketing. Like all of the healthcare marketing tips on this list, creating great content helps increase your practice’s visibility online.

Blog posts, in particular, are an awesome way to post new content on a regular basis. I recommend blogging on popular topics people might be searching for and including photos and links to authoritative resources to increase the value of your content.

Do your patients frequently ask the process for getting dental implants? Do they ask:

This isn't necessarily an additional task you hand over to your receptionist.

​You’re paying them to do their job, but that job is likely not marketing. To ensure your medical practice has the most effective content possible, consider finding a content creator that specializes in healthcare digital marketing.

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Open a YouTube account for your practice. If you already have one, great! Upload a short video with whatever technology you have available (your iPhone, Flip camera, etc.). It doesn’t have to be anything fancy — it could just be you talking for two minutes about a service you offer.

18. Obtain high quality, relevant backlinks

Google is all about offering results that are quality and relevant (well, so they say).

One of the big factors that impacts how it perceives and ranks your website is by whether or not other high authority websites are talking about and linking back to your site.

Now:

Building backlinks can be a time-consuming task, but there are a few strategies in the healthcare industry you can utilize to get quality links in a short amount of time.

19. Manage your reputation online by getting truckloads of reviews

Social proof (third party reviews and endorsements) are essential for any medical practice seeking to gain clout and encourage trust with potential clients. Patient testimonials, reviews, and case studies should be a major part of your healthcare marketing plan. Luckily, you don’t have to put too much extra effort into gathering them.

You’re already taking time every week to look out for negative online feedback.

At the same time, be on the lookout for glowing reviews and positive patient experiences.

One way to truly stand out is by getting positive reviews on Yelp, Google +, other well-visited and authoritative websites. One in four patients check online reviews before choosing a physician. If you don’t have good reviews, or you don’t have any reviews at all, the odds are that the patient will choose another practice.

In order to build your online reviews, make it easy for patients to review your practice and encourage them to do so.

Email patients review requests that only require them to click a button or a link to get to your review page.

Offer links via your website and social media profiles.

Keep the review process short and simple, letting patients know that writing a review will only take a few minutes of their time.

You can do this by creating a review portal with an easy to remember URL that you can direct patients to, as well as adding a button on your website that they can do this. Here's an example of my review portal:

You can display reviews on your website as well to instill confidence and increase conversions.

You should also spend some time fielding any negative reviews you might receive.

You can also reach out to individuals and ask them if they'd be willing to come in and speak about their experience for a minute or two on camera.

A video testimonial is 10x more powerful than a text testimonial! If they agree to this, be sure to be respectful of their time and stick to the agreed upon time limit.

You may even want to interview them to put together a full-blown case study for your medical or dental practice marketing plan.

You should also spend some time fielding any negative reviews you might receive.

Why?

Well, if your medical practice is signed up for Google My Business, then it can appear in Google’s local search results like this:

(Even if you aren't signed up for Google My Business, you still may have a page that Google created, so be sure to check by going to google.com/places and create or claim your page).

Notice that Google reviews are featured prominently in the listing. This can have a serious impact on your click-through rate, as negative reviews may scare people off, and this can ultimately impact your search ranking.

Every week, take a few minutes to read any new reviews about your business that appear on Google, Yelp, and other third-party platforms.

Don't just read them, respond to them!

Depending on the issue, you may even be able to resolve the problem and turn a negative review into a positive one.

​The more reviews you have, then more it can help with a potential rise in the search engine rankings.

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿Get Started Today﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿

Add business information to your Yelp and Healthgrades profiles to make it easier for patients to find you and leave reviews. Be sure your Google My Business profile is set up properly and that patients can find it. Consider setting up a review page like the one above using Grade.us.

Look into obtaining a list of your target customers to send direct mailings to. Find out how to obtain a list of target customers to use for direct mail (and learn more about direct mail for healthcare professionals)​.

21. Embrace responsive web design to get more website traffic

Truth is, websites serve as virtual offices. Now, imagine a patient walking into your office only to find it messy and disorganized.

That's the same way it is when they land on your website only to find that you used 7 different colors that do not match. And chances are, they'll leave almost immediately without taking any action.

If you haven't gotten the point yet, here's a one-liner summary:

You need a clean, professional-looking website to present your practice and services well to prospective patients, period.

Going for something cheap, or edgy can cost you leads, new patients, and even revenue.

These days, there are a number of platforms with thousands of beautiful themes which you can use to build a website that stands out.

Also, take into consideration the responsiveness of your site. You have to design for your users' screen.

Conclusion

Maybe you are ready to embark on a holistic, comprehensive medicine marketing strategy that takes your healthcare practice to the next level. Or, more likely, maybe you’re not too sure yet. After all, you are probably doing some marketing and SEO already and may have even hired an SEO firm in the past. Still, you probably know that you could do better.

About the Author

Tyson Downs, the owner of Titan Web Agency, has years of experience working with small businesses and helping them meet their revenues goals. Prior to starting Titan Web Agency, he freelanced in SEO and Web Design while working in the corporate world. Tyson is a graduate of Brigham Young University, the father of 5, and a passionate bodybuilder.